South African photojournalist Uviwe Mangweni has a way of getting so close to her subjects that you can almost see them breathe. Having grown up in Cape Town, she now lives in the creative centre of Johannesburg where her focus is on documenting the places and moments that most people miss. One early project took her to the ex-mining town of Durban Deep - a run-down locale largely overlooked by cosmopolitan Johannesburg - where she spent a week with its people who scratch out a living with the most basic of amenities. More recently, back in the city, she took her camera to the dozens of hair salons in the business district to capture the hum and buzz of these social hubs. Dazed caught up with Uviwe to find out more about her work, what makes something catch her eye and where she wants to take her camera in the future. 

What drew you to using a camera to tell a story? 
Mostly being bored with life in my university days and just wanting to get out there and create something. A youthful restlessness I suppose. 

Who in the world of photojournalism are you inspired by and why?
To be honest I never aspired to be like anyone, I just did what I did because I felt like it. But when I began understanding the significance of photography, especially in South Africa, I began looking up to the legends like Peter Magubane and Alf Khumalo.

You often shoot in black and white - what drives that?
That usually comes in the editing process. I don’t know, maybe I have a bit of an old soul that wants to recreate the same depth and feeling we see in historical images. But I do shoot in color a lot too. 

There's a very intimate, relaxed quality to your photographs. Is that something you look to achieve?
Yeah, I try to capture people in their most natural way of being. I want to be invisible to them.

What was the idea behind your black hair salon series?
Black hair salons are all over the city of Johannesburg. It feels like there is literally one on every block. One day when I was doing my hair as I frequently do, I just thought about how they are huge part of the socio-economic landscape but they’re hardly captured or recognized.

What is about them that fascinates you?
One can't ignore those colorful murals used to advertise the salons. It's interesting cause they all depict international celebrities and hip hop artists and, a lot of the time, a hairstyle will be named after these celebrities. Also fascinated by how so many salons will occupy the same area in the CBD [the central business district] and almost all of them will survive as a business.

What was your eye drawn to when you photographed them?
I was drawn to the characters in the space at the time and how they interact with one another. There's always a little bit of drama or comedy in cases where the hairstyle did not come out the way it was supposed to.

Could you give a little background to the ex-mining town you photographed?
Durban Deep is an ex-mining town off Main Reef Road, West of Johannesburg. People who reside there are mostly migrants from neighboring cities and countries. They get on with life with no electricity and communal water pumps. It felt ghostly, a stark reminder of SA’s brutal past and how far we still have to go as a country in terms of real redistribution.

How did the town's inhabitants feel about you photographing them?
Initially people were uncomfortable, one would walk past and some people would shut their doors at the sight of a lens. But I kept going back and the more I related to them and explained what my mission was, the more they opened up. Just basic human decency and respect gets you a long way.

Are there other sides of Johannesburg you would like to document?
Yes, I would like to capture more stories that project the vibrance and rich creative culture in this city.

Where else would you like to take your camera in the future? 
(Laughing) I wanna take it everywhere.  But I need to get out more, spend more time on the peripheries of the urban environment. 

Called into the office, take a seat. "Napoleon" will be with you shortly. The chair beside me is vacant, the light in the windowless room scans at my eyes. I sign away my right to have a fellow member of staff present for the meeting. It’s a formality, they’ll be good to me, just as I’m good to all the authors I plagiarise.

A shock. At the end of my three-month probation period, I’m out of the cultural place, mumbling the wordswork ethicto myself like an item on a foreign menu, wondering if the managers decrypted or traced that email I sent anonymously.

“You can appeal,” says Napoleon.

I throw my hands up in the air. Then leave. Two days later my other job falls through. This is the nightmare of everyday life.

We’re clinging onto a liberalism that will, without doubt, be defeated at the next general election. A recent survey found that attitudes are hardening against the poor, even among young people, usually a more tolerant demographic. Outside the bubble of lefty blogs and comment pieces, we may forget that there is a general approval of what the government is doing. A majority of people, for example, would restrict what can be bought with benefits – this effectively means food stamps. So what’s the point? If you can’t get a table, get a waiting job, right?

My friends who used to be on the dole aren’t anymore. Maybe the government was right after all – there was game to be hunted, we just weren’t hungry enough. Is it a coincidence the promise of the dreaded Work Programme made us all crawl off the dole somehow? Cooking pizzas for cash-in-hand money, labouring on building sites, bumming around on friends’ sofas, applying for postgraduate degrees we’ll never be able to afford, moving in with our boyfriends, making life harder for the ones we love? Some of us would have (re)turned to shoplifting, or slept underneath beds, starving and screaming, but we’d have found something somehow, or we’d have killed ourselves on the drugs that seem to stalk the unemployed and hold their heads under the covers each morning, unable and unwilling to get up and look for work.

The truth is, and not many liberals will say this, but a lot of people don’t want to work. The government is probably right. We are lazy, we are choosy. Because don’t you think you’d really have to be masochistic to activelychoosea lot of the jobs out there? To actuallywantto do this work, given the choice, knowing what we know?

As far as I can tell, the reason we’re elitist and choosy is because work has come to stand for something so much worse than we were promised. Promised by ourselves, the lecturers, the poets, the rock stars, the hand of history itself, which we thought would move forward towards greater equality, more opportunity, less misery – an end to deference, the shattering of glass ceilings. But for the first time since I can remember, history seems to be spinning backwards. And as my friend, the nearly-always-on-the-money Dan Hancox says, not back to the 1980s, but the 1880s. Old hierarchies are being consolidated through new power structures – internships, tuition fees, the pricing us out of cities, the rebranding of social security first as welfare and then as charity.

But wait. Everybody’s an artist! Everybody’s got something to say! Have we been coaxed into thinking we can all work for our own disgusting selves and our crippled ideology, outside of the present reality – become graphic designers and freelance photographers and whatever it is university courses train people to do? Most certainly. Our ambitious have given our masters something they feel they need to slap down, put in its place, remind thatsomebody’s got to serve at the till, tend bar, punch numbers into the database. Of course, they’re right. Somebody got to do it. Nobody ever denied that.

So I can’t ignore the fact that there are better solutions out there if we’d only consider them. Take the idea that the national debt ought to be paid off by the richest in society, which they could handle many times over. A 20% tax on the wealth of the top 10% – less in percentage terms than the cuts to housing benefit – would do the trick. Boom – gone. No more austerity, no more “tough decisions” of the kind that always wind up hammering the young and poor.

It would be great too if workers weren’t treated like disposable pieces of machine; if there was an actual incentive to get a job – if it felt like it meant something, and was worthwhile, as opposed to just another form of coercion. Hancox also has some enlightening things to say about this, too, with relation to what’s happening in the ‘utopia’ of Marinaleda in southern Spain, where the rogue mayorJuan Manuel Snchez Gordilloseems to be restoring some dignity for his people.

This is dreamy stuff, I know. I have under a month until I’m totally out of work again. I’m not sure what I’ll do.

As the inimitable Radiohead and Atoms For Peace frontman Thom Yorke landed on the cover of our February Issue this month, we launched our highly prestigious music school with huge names in new electronic music, including the likes of The Gaslamp Killer, FlyLo, Pearson Sound and Actress enrolling.

Now we're calling all art students and illustrators to get involved in the University of Yorke's brand new art department for an exclusive Atoms For Peace competition. This month, the supergroup will be releasing their debut album, AMOK, so we're inviting you to put your artistic hats on and design the most mind-blowing, inventive and trippy cover artwork for the mixtape Thom Yorke made us using the cassette tape template above - taking inspiration from the mix itself and/or the AMOK art (featured in the gallery below).

The artist and longtime Radiohead collaborator, Stanley Donwood, on the AMOK artwork:

"I’ve recently been reading about the Anasazi people, an ancient Native American civilisation that existed in the American Southwest from about the 1st century CE until the 13th century.They built the biggest structures that are known to have existed until the construction of 20th century, massive buildings consisting of hundreds of rooms, which were part of huge cities, and home to hundreds of thousands of people.Theirs was a very sophisticated culture; complex, long-lasting, technologically advanced and evidently very successful.

Although it’s difficult to be certain, it’s clear that many things contributed to the sudden downfall of the Anasazi: overpopulation, resource depletion, deforestation, pollution of waterways, climate change.It’s likely that some people could see what was happening, and equally likely that the great mass of people refused to acknowledge that their way of life was becoming rapidly unsustainable.In the end, nothing could prevent the collapse of this highly-developed and venerable civilisation.It appears that social structures broke down very quickly into a kind of holocaust.Human remains indicate violence, killing, dismemberment and cannibalism.Other evidence is arguably best interpreted as ‘ethnic cleansing’.

Whatever happened, it’s clear that the disaster that overtook the Anasazi people has many parallels in history.It’s a very ‘human’ disaster.We pay a lot of attention to kings, conquests and wars, but more often it is environment and geography that determine the fate of a civilisation, however complex and technologically accomplished it may presume it is.

Strange weather we’ve been having lately, don’t you think?And it seems that we’ve been reduced to fracturing bedrock for oil, rather than it just squirting up out of wells.Doesn’t that seem a bit… desperate? It’s probably all okay though, because we’ve got ‘technology’.Just as well, really, as our civilisation is global.And there’s only one globe."

The prize: An exclusive Thom Yorke-signed 12" vinyl copy of the Atoms for Peace debut album, 'Default', and an issue of the new Dazed & Confused magazine.

To enter: Tag us in your submissions onFacebookor by using #uniofyorke onTwitter.

Deadline: 6pm, Tuesday 5th Feb 2013

See the gallery below for some ideas to get started...

For the January Issue of Dazed & Confused, Danna Takako spent two days in the company of RiFF RAFF, hip hop’s next great white hope. Watch the exclusive behind the scenes video above and read her full interview with him below.

Clad in a silk Tom Ford robe on a red, satin-lined bed in his North Hollywood apartment, viral hip pop wonder RiFF RaFF is licking my hand. A camera flashes, as do the gold grills on his teeth when he smiles afterwards. “I love Tom Ford,” the Houstonite says. “I love Harrison Ford, too.” A few minutes later, he’s throwing a cooking pot filled with Trix cereal over his apartment balcony, yelling “breakfast coming!” in an exaggerated hillbilly accent. At one point, without a word, he walks out of a room squeezing his ass with both hands. Once you spend 48 hours with one of the most loved (and loathed) men in music, you begin to realise that it is impossible to predict – or prepare for – what is going to happen next.

Over the last two years, RiFF RAFF (ne Jody Christian, aka the rap-game autistic, aka the rap-game Jodie Foster, aka the rap-game Dawson’s Creek) has become a star of today’s visually led, ADD-heavy generation. He calls himself a “part-time head turner, full-time jaw dropper” in his underground hit “Jose Canseco”, and has a shoulder-length mane teased like an 80s hair-metal god (or braided into patterned cornrows with yarn), while MTV and BET tattoos fight for space on his neck and torso. The 28-year-old has brought a bizarro sense of humour to the world of rap, keeping jaws on the floor with indecipherable couplets about Ninja Turtles, old white basketball-players and rabies. And weirdly, he makes you want to rap about them too.

“He is a walking entertainment chamber before anything even comes out of his mouth,” says OG Ron C, the founder of key southern-rap label Swishahouse, who grew up in the same North Houston neighbourhood as Christian and was his first manager. “Everybody forgets that the rap game is part of the entertainment business. That’s why he’s winning.” Pop shapeshifter Diplo, who signed RiFF RAFF for a supposed eight-album deal on his Mad Decent imprint last autumn, agrees. “He’s like a walking, talking funny-pages. In the streets he gets stopped by black kids, white kids, old people, young people, because he’s so flamboyant. But as a rapper, he’s one of my favourites. He has the best punchlines, he’s the funniest and he’s got the craziest imagination. He writes hooks for days.”

RiFF RAFF is trying on different pairs of garish sunglasses. “I’ll get the person who tweets me randomly, like, ‘You’re white, I hate you. Why do you got braids?’ Then a couple weeks later I’ll see the same Twitter name saying, ‘Damn man, this is my new favourite artist, I love him.’ I’m not the average person so when somebody sees me it’s going to be bipolar: it’s one or the other, you’re going to love me or hate me.” He adjusts a gold $100 bill ring that covers his first two fingers. “I can’t change me and I can’t change other people’s thinking. All I can do is continuously get better. So if I’m doing that, even if somebody doesn’t like me or respect me, I don’t care.”

His “MTV” neck tattoo serves as a memento of his first show-stealing entry into the media world in 2009: a memorable stint on the thugreform reality series From G’s To Gents. Eliminated after two episodes, RiFF RAFF described the show as “an hors d’oeuvre on a table. It’s not a steak and shrimp, it’s like somebody had some cheese crackers on a table and I decided to eat a couple.”

The main meal came in 2012, it seems. He’s been impossible to avoid this year, thanks to an endless maze of wavy music videos and improv comedy sketches, and a bewildering variety of famous alter-egos (most notably his posh British alias Jody Highroller). His videos hit colossal figures; after his original YouTube account got banned for inappropriate content, his JodyHighroller channel racked up over 17 million views in ten months. He’s flooded the market with mixtapes and internet hits (including collabs with Action Bronson, Kitty Pryde, Wiz Khalifa and Lil B), but has yet to release a debut album. He is the quintessential modern musical phenomenon.

“If you watch one YouTube of his,” Diplo explains, “you automatically think, ‘This is the wackest shit I’ve ever seen.’ You watch two of his YouTubes and think, ‘Damn, this is weird. Why am I watching this again?’ But on the third one, you realise he’s a fucking genius.” He laughs and adds, “But the best thing about him is he’s just genuine. He genuinely exists in this other world – the rap twilight-zone.”

Just as with his tattoo-wrapped body, the inside of RiFF RAFF’s two-room studio is dotted with splashes of colour, impulse and weirdness. Retro abstract modern art fills the walls. Four different shades of du-rags and a packet of dazzle beads (usually worn on the end of his braids) are spread across a table in his living room. Piles of bombastic vintage clothes line the floors, including LA Light sneakers and a few aerobic jackets that must have graced the wardrobe of a soccer mom in the 90s. Shopping bags from Gucci and Versace sit upright on the carpet. His kitchen cupboards store iced-out chains that he designed himself, hiring a local LA jeweller to create a bejewelled Cheshire cat and an oversized pendant in the shape of an ICEE slush cup.

“I haven’t even started my career yet, really,” RiFF RAFF says, spreading out a wad of $100 bills on his bedspread for a photo. “I haven’t dropped my first album yet, I haven’t been on a world tour, I’ve never done a big-deal song. So all this buzz and everybody talking about me is all...” He trails off and shrugs. “My shit, it started at ground zero. All of my fans and the people who really understand, they research me – they see this shit day by day, building. It’s like a boxer training for a fight. I started out this chubby kid who started working out progressively everyday. So everyday for the last year or two I’ve just been training, and now I’m in top-quality shape, ready to go. I’m jumping past all the lightweights, featherweights, and going straight to the title fight.”

For a guy who has built his career off DIY videos, it’s no surprise that he harbours dreams of becoming a Hollywood Highroller. Rumours abound that Harmony Korine based James Franco’s lead character in the forthcoming Spring Breakers on the Houston native, and although Korine and Franco have stated otherwise, RiFF RAFF’s not entirely convinced. “When people see James Franco in this movie, they’re gonna see me,” he says while shuffling through his music collection – an interesting mix of Gucci Mane, Little Dragon, SBTRKT and Culture Club. “Since the movie, me and Harmony have become good friends. We have some bigger shit coming, more movies will come. I got so much going on in my mind, I’m never comfortable. I always need more, more, more.”

His hunger for more is deeply rooted. Raised in the streets of the south, he was the middle son in a family of seven. When asked about the music played in his house, he puts on the lowdown country songs of John Anderson and Toby Keith and hilariously belts out every single lyric. It makes sense of the country influence in his acousticguitar jam “Time”. But growing up, he says, “It went off to where there was not a lot of money. I’ve had no money, I’ve had a lot of money, I’ve lost a lot of money. I’ve been back and forth with everything.” He pauses. “That’s why other people’s input doesn’t really matter to me, because nobody’s put me where I’m at. I don’t owe anyone shit. No one’s responsible for me and I’m not responsible for anyone.”

The cameras are off and RiFF RAFF lies on his couch, facing the ceiling. While speaking, he forms a circle with his forefinger and thumb in the same shape as a circular lamp above him, and moves it up and down repeatedly towards the lamp and back down towards his eye. It’s reminiscent of a hyperactive, daydreaming kid at school not listening to the teacher. “School was so boring,” he says. (Supposedly he dropped out in tenth grade.) “It’s like, if you don’t like coffee, drink something else. And if you don’t like school, do something else.” In many ways, RiFF RAFF is rap’s Peter Pan, refusing to grow up or play by anyone else’s rules.

He tends to keep to himself for that same reason. “If I do let someone into my life, then we have to do things my way,” he says, shortly after directing the Dazed team with shot ideas. “Otherwise we’ll be clashing heads. And after one or two times of clashing heads I’m going to erase you out of my phone and out of my life. I don’t argue. I do things my way... Nobody can hurt you if they’re not in your life. Once you totally sever someone from your life and cut all ties, you have no more emotion towards them because they don’t exist in your memory.”

Perhaps he does truly live moment by moment without looking back, solely “based off instinct and feeling”, as he claims. Or it could be that he uses his raps and characters as an escape route. His rhymed free-association flies at a staggering pace, hopping between obscure metaphors and pop-culture references. The lyrics from “Squirt” (with Lil Debbie) attest: “I want the world in my hands, PalmPilot / Butterknife the chopper, razorblade the margarine / I beg your pardon Olive Garden Aston Martin.”

Producer Paul Devro, creative director at Mad Decent, highlights the intensity of RiFF RAFF’s creative output. “When we go to the studio, I’ll play him at least 30–40 beats every session. Within five to ten seconds of each song, he’ll either mumble a melody to it or say, ‘Next.’ I hear ‘next’ a lot.” He laughs. “With each one he picks, he’ll write to it, usually one hook and one verse. We record six to ten songs in about a three-hour period this way. We laugh when we record them a lot. He knows how insane some things he says are, but it all makes sense.” When asked about the album deal they signed, Devro says, “It’s either eight or 44 albums. No one will ever know.”

RiFF RAFF’s transition into America’s wildest white rapper began in earnest when signed by Soulja Boy’s label, S.O.D. Money Gang (as the “SODMG” tat on his stomach indicates). Dismissive as he may be about the past, RiFF RAFF’s upbringing is throwed throughout his diverse tracks. He holds down the hypnotic flows of H-Town’s syrup-sippin’ idols from the late 90s (such as Fat Pat), and he can sing with the R&B funk of the legendary Pimp C (his “Lil Mama I’m Sorry” anthem is proof). “The reason why he probably doesn’t really talk too much about Houston,” OG Ron C explains, “is because a lot of people thought his style is the old Houston. That’s what he grew up on so that’s what he knows, but people hated. I knew it would work. I just loved the creativity and his personality. He’s always seen a bigger picture than everyone.”

Back at the hand Back at the hand-licking photoshoot, RiFF RAFF is throwing and catching Haribo gummies in his mouth. He’d arrived a half-hour late to the shoot (“My condolences... I brought a bottle of vodka!” was his intro) after a full morning of shooting a music video “for some internet thing.” The night before he had a studio recording session with Mike Posner, the underground Drake. With his translucent blue eyes widely dilated, he admits to living “a fast life. I do a lot of shit that I probably shouldn’t.”

Life in the fast lane is one thing; the hype machine moves even faster. RiFF RAFF’s homegirl Kreayshawn is certainly an interesting case-study in viral rap-wonders gone wrong: her debut album is rumoured to have set the all-time record for the lowest first-week sales in major-label history. When asked which is the better fate – to live too fast and lose one’s mind, or to disappear into oblivion and lose the public’s mind – he doesn’t flinch. But he doesn’t exactly answer, either.

“Bottom line,” he says, “either you’re gonna accept that I’m great, or you’re gonna ignore it. You know what I mean?” Two of his friends arrive unexpectedly. Shouting “turnt up!”, when he opens the door, they mob in, putting Chief Keef on full-blast. Young, reckless and infectious, they down shots of Russian vodka (with a milk chaser) and make joke variations of the phrase “turnt up”. One of them, Jackson, says he’s been friends with RiFF RAFF for five years, and works with him in a capacity that’s “hard to explain”. His companion offers that Jackson is the “rap-game Robin”, as in Batman and Robin.

“When it comes to friends,” RiFF RAFF had said earlier, “I don’t like to be around just anybody. Everything has to happen for a reason.” Later that night, RiFF RAFF is arriving at the Standard Hotel in Hollywood with the ATL Twins, following a live radio session. The blond identical twins (Sidney and Thurman Sewell, aka Sid & Thurm) are also featured in Spring Breakers. They not only dress, think and talk the same, they also always have sex with the same girl at the same time. Tonight they’re with a striking, voluptuous French siren.

The trio’s shared hotel-room has become the set for an impromptu music video shot by @MATTHEWBOMAN (director of stripper/rapper Brooke Candy’s “Das Me” video). Someone in the room spontaneously rips open one of the hotel pillows and turns on a giant fan. Whirring feathers fill the air, the French girl’s shirt comes off, and questions of a journalist’s duties arise when asked to “dance and twerk on the silver beanbag on the bed.” As I twerk in a Venetian mask, coughing on feathers, I wonder if I would ever believe this story myself.

Just as RiFF RAFF is in the middle of lip-syncing his verse, a pounding on the door rises above the iPod dock. A dreadlocked skater, drinking vodka out of a large Evian bottle, stumbles over to open it. Most of what he says to the unimpressed security guards in the doorway is incomprehensible, but a distinct line jumps out: “A woman on PCP ran into this room, ripped open one of the pillows and then ran off. We don’t know who she was or where she went.” The ATL Twins look slightly worried about room charges. They talk in hushed tones with an occasional glint from their matching top-teeth grills. RiFF RAFF is freestyling in the corner, covered head to toe in feather shrapnel, totally unfazed. In a glance, it sums him up: amused in his own abstruse world, completely self-aware but unconcerned with much else.

“People have to use ignorance to catch up or to dumb (what I do) down,” he’d said earlier in the day. “When you haven’t seen anything before, it’s like a UFO. I’m like the Loch Ness monster. But I’m not a myth. I’m right here, in the flesh.”

Text by Danna Takako
Photography Nick Haymes
Film by UZI

Cindy Gallop wants you to have good sex, for real. In 2009 the New York City-based advertising executive gave a four-minute talk at a TED conference that became one of the event’s most talked about presentations. “I date younger men, predominantly men in their 20s,” was her opening line, and she went on to discuss the obvious influence of hardcore porn on the sex techniques of her young lovers. According to Gallop, internet porn has created a generation of young people who think that “what you see in hardcore pornography is the way that you have sex.” Basically, in the absence of proper sex-ed, porn has become the default sex-educator.

Gallop used her TED talk to unveil makelovenotporn.com, a witty, non-judgmental website that compares sex in the “porn world” to that in the “real world”. For example: “Porn World: Women come all the time in positions where nothing is going anywhere near the clit. Real World: There has to be some sort of rhythmic pressure on the clit in just the right way to make a woman come. Can be public bone, tongue, fingers, something else entirely. But it has to be there.” Oh, how true.

The site became a worldwide phenomenon, leading Gallop to publish the book Make Love Not Porn: Technology's Hardcore Impact on Human Behavior. Four years later, she’s now preparing to launch makelovenotporn.tv, a video-based social-media site that aims to revolutionise sexual entertainment by offering videos of real people having real sex. Say goodbye to smoke and mirrors and anal bleaching –this is the real deal!

The best thing about makelovenotporn.com is that it’s funny. It’s so much less awkward to talk about sex when there’s humour involved.
Exactly. I wrote all the copy myself, and I deliberately made it lighthearted to defuse the embarrassment that exists around talking about sex. Also, when I was creating the site I said to my designer, ‘I don't want the slightest whiff of education or public service about it,’ because that’s the kiss of death where kids are concerned. I said, ‘I want you to take your design cues from the world of hardcore porn.’

And were you surprised by the response?
The response has been so extraordinary. I’ve been receiving emails about the site literally every day for the past four years. They tend to go something like this: ‘I came across your TED talk, I went to your website, I shared them both with my girlfriend/boyfriend/lover, and off the back of that we had a great conversation, and now our sex life is so much better.’ Essentially, the site is working as an objective, outside platform that helps people have the conversations they need to have.

You’re like the Santa Claus of good sex! So can you explain your new venture, makelovenotporn.tv?
Well, the sheer amount of emails I received made me feel that I had a personal responsibility to take Make Love Not Porn forward, in a way that would make it more far-reaching and effective. One of my philosophies – born of my advertising background – is ‘communication through demonstration’. So I decided to take every dynamic that currently exists in social media, and apply them to the one area no other social platform has gone or will ever dare to go: sex. I want to socialise sex, and to make real-world sex socially acceptable, and therefore just as socially shareable as anything else we share on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. So makelovenotporn.tv is a user-generated, crowdsourced platform on which anybody from anywhere in the world can submit videos of themselves having real-world sex.

And how do you define real-world sex?
Real-world sex is not performing for the camera; it's funny, messy, human, and ridiculous. It's the shit that really happens. For example, the total nightmare of putting the condom on. Guys are supposed to be able to do this like magic, but as we all know it often doesn't happen like that, and sometimes things go soft, juices go dry and libidos get derailed. Or fanny farts – everyone does it, nothing to be ashamed of. Also, I find it so amusing when people talk about porn being “dirty”, because porn actually sanitises sex. In porn nobody has hair, you never actually see anybody using lube, or having sex on their period, when actually that’s when girls are the horniest! So we want categories like ‘period sex’ – bring it on, blood everywhere – no big deal, take the tampon out with your teeth.

So your site will show actual orgasms, not the fake, overdramatic screamed orgasms common in mainstream porn?
Totally. For example, our very first submission was from a young straight couple, and as I was watching it, no matter how hot what they were doing to each other was, I just could not stop looking at the girl’s face. And the reason was because she was loving it. She was so aroused that it became adorable. You never see faces like that in porn.

Will there be a fee for users?
We charge $5 per video for a three-week streaming rental. We also charge $5 to submit a video to the site, which is a curation fee, as my team and I will review all submissions. But then we revenue share – we give you, the contributor, 50% of the revenue that your makelovenotporn.TV video generates.

Whoa, so one can potentially make a lot of money.
Absolutely! In theory, your video could hit the YouTube holy grail of a million rentals, and at $5 a rental, the revenue is a nice amount of cash. That’s why we like to call ourselves ‘the Etsy of Sexy’.

Does makelovenotporn.tv have a primary ambition?
The message is pure and simple: talk about it. The issue I'm tackling is not porn, I'm tackling our society’s lack of an open, healthy dialogue around sex and porn. Because people find it bizarrely difficult to talk about sex with the people they're actually having it with, because they’re terrified of hurting the other person’s feelings, or putting them off, or derailing the entire relationship. But at the same time, people really want to please their partners and make them happy, so they take cues on how to please from anywhere they can, and if the only cues people have are from porn, then those are the ones they take, to not very good effect.

And is it only men who are being misled by this sex-ed-through-porn trend?
Not at all. I talk to young men who say, ‘My girlfriend is putting on a performance in bed and it’s getting in the way of a real connection.’ One guy said, ‘I've been getting a lot of pornified blowjobs lately. I don't know whether she's really into me or if it’s what she thinks she should be doing.' So it cuts both ways.

That makes sense.
And porn does a massive disservice for men, because it makes them think that sex is entirely dick-centric – it’s all about how big it is and how hard it is. For example, the other night I was with a 25-year-old, and for whatever reason he was having some trouble getting it up. I didn’t mind, but obviously he cared massively, and so as unfortunately often happens in these situations, the entire session became about his need to get it up and cum. And I was thinking, well, there’s actually a whole different way to approach us being in bed together, and it doesn't have to be all about addressing your penis. Great sex is about the whole body. I deliberately spend time telling the men I sleep with how beautiful they are, and praising various parts of their bodies that aren't their dick, and they're stunned when I do this, because that’s not something they've even conceptualised. So for a lot of men, porn is causing unnecessary neuroses and insecurity.

Do you think people truly have difficulty understanding that porn is not an accurate representation of real sex? That it’s sensationalised for entertainment, just like regular films?
I had this conversation with some students in Oxford recently, because they were saying, ‘Come on, how could anybody think that porn is real? It's like disaster movies or police chases.’ But here's the difference: you can watch The Fast and the Furious, but everybody knows and talks about how to drive in real life. But with sex there’s no counterpoint, because we don't talk about how sex operates in the real world. That’s why our tagline is 'Pro-Sex, Pro-Porn, and Pro-Knowing-the-Difference'.

You have said you think makelovenotporn.tv could actually benefit the mainstream porn industry. How so?
Porn is a male-dominated industry. Now, the best of all possible worlds, in every sector, is one that is designed by men and women equally. I explain to guys that us girls like porn too – who doesn’t like to watch other people fucking?! – but often we have to watch porn that’s made for men. So I'm watching porn and trying to get off, but I can't avoid processing it through the lens of female experience. I can’t help but think, ‘I know that hurts – if she keeps her leg up one more moment she's going to get a cramp, I know she's not actually coming,’ etc. But I want to see real-life sex, because I’m much more in tune emotionally with something I can relate to. The world of porn hasn't even begun to experience what women can bring to the table. Make Love Not Porn is a venture founded by a woman, conceived by a woman, and built by a tech team that is more female than male. So that's part of how we want to help the porn industry – by demonstrating that it’s possible to create a disruptive, innovative new business model, and to leverage human sexuality entertainment in a whole different way.